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According to Nomura, a brokerage, the value of the average Japanese house depreciates to zero in 22 years. (It is calculated separately from the land, which is more likely to hold its value.) Most are knocked down and rebuilt. Sales of new homes far outstrip those of used ones, which usually change hands in the expectation that they will be demolished and replaced. In America and Europe second-hand houses accounted for 90% of sales and new-builds for 10% in 2017. In Japan the proportions are the other way around.

It is calculated separately from the land, which is more likely to hold its value.

That's interesting. Presumably, the homeowners pay for a lease on the land, as well as for the house, and I wonder how much of the overall price is made up of the land cost.

There's currently a fair amount of angst in Singapore, over the perceived diminishing value of leasehold residential properties. About 90 per cent of Singaporeans are homeowners, thanks to generous government subsidies for public flats, which typically come with 99-year leases. Up until around 2008, such homes could fetch substantially higher resale prices and, as such, they were seen as nearly risk-free retirement assets.

But a growing number of young, aspiring home buyers also felt that the housing market had raced out of their reach, and punished the ruling party heavily in the 2011 elections. The government responded by ramping up the supply of new public flats, and introducing stiff property-cooling measures. Prices of resale flats have since stabilised, as a result.

But stable prices also mean that these homes are not necessarily as valuable as retirement assets as they used to be. Combine this with the fact that some of the oldest flats in Singapore are now close to 40 years old, and are about halfway through their land leases. This creates the growing anxiety about whether the public flats would retain any value at all, the nearer they get to the end of their lease.

Pachinko parlors will face new competition now that the Diet has allowed the establishment of three casinos. But I wouldn't worry too much about Konami; they're busy making slot machines.

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A pet project of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, the casinos will be embedded in family-friendly resorts, partly in a bid to counter their seedy image. Tempers ran high as the bill inched toward law. An attempt by the government to cut off debate sparked scuffles among lawmakers.

Most Japanese have little enthusiasm for casinos, which they associate with gambling addiction and yakuza gangsters. Nearly two-thirds of the population oppose them. Yet it is not hard to see why the country sets the hearts of casino operators aflutter. Greater Tokyo, with legions of wealthy retirees among its 35m residents, could handily outstrip tiny Singapore as a gambling hub. Sheldon Adelson, the boss of Las Vegas Sands, calls it the “ultimate business opportunity”. Hard Rock Café and MGM Resorts have spent years cultivating local partners in the hopes of getting some of the expected ¥2trn in annual revenue.

More than a third of tourists take a dip in an onsen and a growing number of them are tattooed. “Some businesses are at a loss about what to do with all these foreigners,” says Mr Ota [of the Japan Tourist Agency].

“We’re surprised by how many have body art," said one owner.

Many onsen ban tattooed visitors because of the association between tattoos and yakuza.

In the past three months [retailer] Start Today has distributed to just over 1m Japanese customers, free of charge, its “Zozosuit”, a skin-tight, full-body suit covered in around 350 fiducial markers, small objects that can be used as a point of reference for measurements. Shoppers slip on the suit and slowly rotate as their smartphone takes photos.

They have gotten the cost down to $9 per suit, so giving them away has become financially viable. Six percent of Japan's consumers use the suit, but analysts worry there isn't much more room for growth.

"One thing led to another, and this new figure known as "Princess Bowser" in Japanese
has taken the internet by storm, ranking at least as high as the #4 trending term on
Twitter. She has mostly become known as "Bowsette" in English, and although fellow
fans have created many variations, @ayyk92's original depiction of Bowsette as a
horned blonde in a black dress is most popular. The original Bowsette tweet has received
more than 70,000 retweets and 160,000 likes so far.

Capitalizing on the trend, many other Twitter users have contributed their own versions
of Bowsette, some pulling in inspiration from various Mario Bros. games."

Only seven Japanese women have won their nation's golf championship, the Japan Open, in its 43-year history. Today they were joined by 19-yo phenom Hataoka Nasa. Three women tied for second, two of them Japanese -- the veteran Ueda Mamoko and 23-yo Nagamine Saki.

The victory puts Hataoka in fourth place in the season-long "Race to the CME Globe" which gives her an advantage over players ranked below five when the final tournament is played in a couple of weeks. It was her second victory on the LPGA Tour this year. She picked up $225,000, a new Mercedes, and a pearl necklace. Hataoka-san has now earned over $1.4 million on the Tour this year alone.

Tokyo (Nov 12, 2018): While more than half of Japanese feel that their communities are shrinking, only about 14 per cent believe it is necessary for society to actively accept foreign workers and those wishing to settle in order to keep their regions going, a survey has found.

The survey, which covered 2,000 people aged 18 or over nationwide, was conducted by Jiji Press in an interview format between Oct 5 and Oct 8, and received valid answers from 62.6 per cent of participants...

...The combined share of respondents who felt that the population of their community is decreasing, either "very much" or "somewhat", came to 56.4 per cent.

...[When] asked about the measures needed to keep their communities viable, with multiple answers allowed, 71.8 per cent — the largest group — called for financial assistance from local authorities to attract young couples raising families to live there.

The second-largest group, or 27.9 per cent, cited the need to create jobs in local areas through deregulation in the agriculture, forestry and fisheries industries, followed by 19.8 per cent who pointed to the importance of companies introducing teleworking systems to enable employees to work in remote areas.

Only 14.6 per cent said that local communities should actively accept workers and settlers from abroad.

THE JAPAN TIMES

The preferred solutions are not unreasonable, and I feel they actually make sense on a local level. Particularly in our era of ubiquitous telecommunications, there are likely a number of jobs in services that don't require people to be physically in large urban centres to work. And I've read of one town in Hokkaido that has successfully drawn in an increasing number of young families because of the better living environment it could offer.

I find it interesting that it's the communities themselves that are calling for deregulation of Japan's agricultural sector, but I would be more careful about deregulating forestry and fisheries, to prevent over-exploitation.

But on a national level, there's no escaping the fact that the Japanese economy is doomed to shrink, as no amount of productivity gain is going to make up for the persistent loss of population, and hence labour.

A recurring visual theme in Japanese media is the drop of water falling into a still pool and creating concentric circles. It's quite common in anime and appears, I've discovered, in live-action programs as well. Sometimes it's a single drop, sometimes as in the NHK's intriguing Yae no Sakura which I'm currently watching, it is drops of rain. Does anyone know why this image is so common? Does it have some symbolic meaning?

(Yae no Sakura was the NHK's Taiga drama for 2013. It follows the life of Yamamoto Yae (1843-1932), a young woman from an Aizu gunnery family who forces her father and brother to allow her to learn how to shoot a rifle. Later she uses that skill to help defend Aizu from the Choshu-Satsuma forces during the Boshin War that led to the Meiji Restoration. It stars Ayase Haruka in the title role, whom some of you may recognize from her performance as Balsa during the 2016-2018 NHK live-action version of the Moribito novels.)

Tokyo (Dec 19, 2018): The Japanese tradition of eating fried chicken on Christmas may be built on a lie.

The first KFC opened in Japan in 1970. The store manager, Takeshi Okawara, struggled to drive sales.

Christmas was not a major event in Japan at the time, where less than 2 per cent of the population is Christian. However, a nun who worked at a nearby school asked if Okawara would get involved in a Christmas party if it served KFC’s fried chicken.

Okawara agreed. He even dressed up as Santa Claus himself, dancing around the classroom with a bucket of fried chicken.

The party was a success, and soon another kindergarten class asked for a KFC-themed Christmas party. Okawara decided to take the idea and run with it, putting Santa costumes on Colonel Sanders statues outside of KFC stores and marketing fried chicken as a replacement to the American turkey Christmas dinner.

But Okawara admitted, in hindsight, that he had lied.

"I...know that the people are not eating chicken, they are eating turkey," Okawara said. "But I said yes. It was [a] lie. I still regret that. But people...like it."